Sunday’s reading at Cafe La Boheme was a wonderful event. Poet Francisco Alacrcon wote a poem about it that he was kind enough to share:

POET/ACTIVIST ALFONSO TEXIDOR HAS A STREET NAMED AFTER HIM IN THE MISSION DISTRICT OF SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

Alejandro Murguía, Poet Laureate of San Francisco, announced at the Memorial Celebrating Alfonso Texidor’s life that the City of San Francisco had named the alley next to Café La Boheme in honor of Alfonso Texidor, the Puerto Rican poet/activist and ubiquitous icon of the Mission District who passed away on December 25, 2014

Photo by Eva Martinez . Packed house at first part of Alfonso Texidor’s memorial at La Boheme next to the newly named Alfonso Texidor Street.

Both parts of the Memorial Celebrating Alfonso Texidor’s Life brought together and featured the best the community has to offer. In the first part, Aztec dancers did the beginning ceremony dancing in front of Cafe la boheme San francisco, Jorge Tetl Argueta was a masterful MC, the musicians and poets were truly outstanding. The second part included an altar dedicated to Alfonso Texidor in the lobby of The Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, wonderful posters dedicated to Alfonso Texidor by Michael Rauner and Francisco Orrego. Again the musicians, poets, ceremonial facilitators made the memorial a remarkable event. ¡Viva la poesía! ¡Viva la vida!

Best Thing I Saw All Week: Dotty Payne and Michael Warr at Readers Bookstore Fort Mason. Just in time for Black History Month. “Today would have been Trayvon Martin’s twentieth birthday,” Payne announced, “and this reading is dedicated to him.” Dotty has roots and family in Ferguson and has been back and forth several times since the current troubles began. She mixed recent poems drawn from those experiences with jazz poems—portraits of Lois Armstrong and Illinois Jacquet—and lead off with an extraordinary poem about her first childhood exposure to African-Americans in the person of a black man rendered non-threatening by castration. Warr had recently been labeled an ‘extremist’ which surprised and obviously irked him, “I tend to write about things that really happened, to me, and to others,” he said. At one point in the reading he paused to say, “I sometimes grow tired of writing the same poems over and over again. I am thinking about taking poems that I have written about these atrocities over the years and plugging in the names of the latest victims.” He revisited those older poems, reading from his two books, ‘Armageddon of Funk’ and ‘We Are All the Black Boy,’ and proved to be more prophet than extremist. Fergusson looms over everything it seems, especially this month.Best Thing I Heard All Week: Osmium by Parliament. I pulled this out to accompany George Clinton’s memoir (more later) and was surprised at how little of it I remembered. The fun in this is in the joy of rediscovery; not something you’ll want to put on to kick off a party or to salve your consciousness during acupuncture. Released in 1970 and full of strange, loving parodies/homages including a couple of deranged country songs (complete with Jew’s harp solo and pedal steel) and some half-assed gospel. Even the bid for a hit “I Call My Baby Pussycat” comes off as tongue-in-cheek (“…I spell that p-u-s-s-y,” goes the refrain). This is psychedelic soul at its zenith and, as must be expected from Clinton, consistently very funny. Not slick and tight like the contemporaneous “Psychedelic Shack” or slick and sprawling like the later “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone,” it reminds me of the Bar-Kays’ long-lost Black Rock. Clinton was going for something less Motown, less Stax, than those, something more rock-derived—lots of Hendrix-inspired guitar (from Tawl Ross and Fuzzy Haskins), and rock rhythm changes—nothing less than a great wild stab at a musical unified field theory, with results similar to the same search in physics. Perhaps the metallurgical title is a hint.

Join us every Thursday at 6:30 p.m. in our Readers Bookstore Fort Mason for our weekly FREE poetry series! Browse books and enjoy a glass of wine while listening to internationally acclaimed poets and artists such as Jonathan Richman, David Meltzer, Diane di Prima and California Poet Laureate Al Young. The series is curated by Friends’ Resident Poet Jack Hirschman. For a full line-up and more information please visit our website at www.friendssfpl.org.

This February 5th we are excited to have Michael Warr and Dorothy Payne read!

Michael Warr’s books of poetry include The Armageddon of Funk (2011), Power Lines: A Decade of Poetry From Chicago’s Guild Complex (1999) as a co-editor, and We Are All The Black Boy (1991), all published by Tia Chucha Press.His awards include the 2014 Creative Work Fund award for his multimedia project “Tracing Poetic Memory in Bayview Hunters Point,” 2012 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature, 2012 Poetry Honor Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association (BCALA), the Gwendolyn Brooks Significant Illinois Poets Award, a National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, and others. The Black Caucus of the American Library Association described The Armageddon of Funk as “A poetic soundtrack to black life.” The Crisis Magazine, founded by W.E.B. DuBois, refers to Warr as a “literary long-distance runner,” and “poet-traveler.” A frequent collaborator with musicians, visual and performing artists, Michael’s poems have been dramatized on stage, depicted on canvas, and set to original music. For links to his writing, recordings, and multimedia experiments in poetry go to armageddonoffunk.tumblr.com. He is currently editing “Of Poetry & Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin” and anthology combining poems, essays, portraits, and archival images.

Over the decades I have witnessed smug poets put down the work of the poet Rod Mc Kuen. True, he was not a great poet, but how many great poets are out there? Much of this criticism was no doubt due to jealousy that his books have sold over 60 million copies, while most small press poets would be jumping with joy if they had a book out that sold one hundred copies

Many of his mall press critics are most likely not aware that in the fifties he read his work with Kerouac and Ginsberg at the Jazz Cellar in San Francisco, nor that some of his best-known songs were written with composer Jacques Brel, or that Frank Sinatra, Chet Baker. Madonna. and others were among recognized artists who recorded his material. Charles Plymell published a poem of his and mine in his literary magazine Cold Spring Journal that resulted in Mc Kuen and I corresponding for many years. One of his letters touched me deeply, and I wrote and asked him if it was OK for me to share it with others.

He gave me his blessing, and so I share it here.

Dear AD,I put off reading Akbar’s interview with you until I could safely squirrel away some time to really read it. I knew it would be worthwhile and as I suspected the answers blew away the questions. You always exceed my expectations of you.Lots of excuses for setting aside pure and thoughtful enjoyment such as perusing words from a poet and human being I admire and respect.

A member of the family wasted away and died – just a cat to anyone who thinks being owned by a feline, silly, stupid or just plain weird, but Kubby was the closest thing I had left to a family. I haven’t heard from one brother since he was, after much petitioning brought handcuffed by plain clothed guards, from some penitentiary or another, to Mom’s funeral some decades past. Long ago we had stopped getting along when we were just getting along and not relating. The other brother? We are too close. Life was never easy with him and I’m sure his appraisal of me would be the same. Still I love him and would do anything for him but our life together seems increasingly a series of threats and demands by him and negotiations or silence from me. I am too old to quarrel and find it a waste of time so the silences between us grow longer.Last month I turned 74 and he, like you, is 71 – born three years and two days apart we celebrate our birthdays on the day between . . . so on April 28th we turned 150.Losing Kubby only amplified my sense of aloneness, not solitude, I covet solitude and can never get enough of it. I know you feel the same about the productivity and solace of being alone, your poetry, approach to it and your forty year fight to have time alone to write ring clear.Other excuses; deadlines not met, promises not kept, mail unanswered, as always saying yes to every project offered and only fulfilling a portion of them. Making endless lists, feeling guilty about not cleaning up my room . ..let alone my life. And, on and on and on. (What guts to complain about every flat surface in my room being taken up with stuff when your rooms and world have recently burned down.) I hope you have waded through all this AD because it’s a preamble to what I want to say about the kinship I found in your words. Having your poetry to rely on is something, but overhearing your conversation with an interviewer starts to make a presumptive friendship with you important. It’s after 4:00 am here, as it is up north with you, and I haven’t yet gotten to the meat and spuds of what I want to address, I’m rambling and growing tired — though I know it will be another sleepless night. Even changing the trusty right hand to the left, thus attempting to entice and surprise my dick, doesn’t seem to work any more but I’ll get through this night and morning as I do the rest.Wanted you to know in the meantime that I’m thinking of you and that your words are spinning in my ears. With a clearer head & maybe no scotch I’ll continue, maybe even before cleaning my room.Please remember that poets go on forever, whatever that is and the best that can be said for academians is that they had a nut named after them. All of us are out there in the same leaky boat and we should be bailing instead of throwing mud at one another.Luv and all that goes with it,Rod

The Readers Review is managed by Friends of the San Francisco Public Library and offers book reviews, author interviews, book seller/collector news, Bay Area literary events coverage, listings and everything in between.